A responsive design adapts the content of your ecommerce site to the size of all types of screens, thus, your online store can be viewed on all devices (tablet, smartphone, etc). Responsive design is now essential for any ecommerce store because it provides better visibility of your products/services and improves your conversion rate.

Why choose a responsive design for your online shopping site? What alternatives are available to you if you currently do not have a responsive design?

Growth of m-commerce

Consumers are no longer only shopping from their desktop. In one of our articles last week we reported that the m-commerce market in the UK is the most mature in all of Europe, accounting for 13% of all online sales. According to multi-channel payment solutions company PayPoint, by 2019 mobile will account for 19.6% of online sales. Therefore, online retailers need to embrace this trend and adapt their websites accordingly, as to not miss out on this profitable opportunity.

Multi-channel consumers

With the boom of devices consumers today are spoiled for choice. They can now view and purchase products/services via their computer, tablet or even smartphone. Therefore it is necessary to standardise your content on these three main media through a Responsive Web Design.

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Retargeting (or remarketing) enables you to maximise traffic to your site and increase conversion rate by targeting visitors who leave your online store with customised adverts on other sites, based on their interactions on your site.

Popularised by the French company Criteo, retargeting has quickly established itself as an effective way to increase conversion on ecommerce sites. Founded in 2005 by Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, Franck le Ouay and Romain Nicoli, Criteo is today a world leader in behavioural retargeting

Google is also a major player in this market. During this year’s Lengow Ecommerce Day, Google employees Catherine Boisset and Leo Sei, hosted a workshop dedicated to Google Remarketing, the retargeting solution developed by Google. Whether you want to reach customers and/or prospects who’ve shown some interest in your site, increase the number of customers and customer loyalty, or even re-engage your old customers, retargeting has become an indispensable tool in e-commerce.

Here is a basic recap of what you need to know to start using retargeting

Principle of retargeting

• The visitor goes to your ecommerce site,
• The sections and pages they visit are tracked (via cookies)
• They leave your online shop without buying the product they looked at and continue their internet browsing
• The product is then re-exposed to them while they are on partner websites or ad-exchange platforms,
• Thanks to the personalisation of advertising, the customer clicks on the banner,
• They are they redirected back to your website, where they will hopefully make a purchase.

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Last year Britons spent £38.8 billion online and £4.9 billion of this amount was attributed to goods or services bought through mobile devices. Thus m-commerce accounts for 13% of the UK’s online spend, making the UK the most mature m-commerce market in Europe. Pairing this information with the fact that there are more mobile phones in the world than people, it is clear that m-commerce is too big a trend to ignore.

Simply having a mobile presence is not enough, it has to be optimised. Here are a few tips to help you get the most from this profitable channel.

1. Create a responsive design

A responsive design takes into account the device the site is being viewed on and displays the interface accordingly. Google recommends responsive design as the best way of going mobile and getting the best SEO results.

Rather than designing fixed layouts, responsive design means you can customise the viewing experience depending on the device being use and thus display the information in the optimum way. Furthermore, responsive design lets you use the same domain name, and so by using one URL you eliminate costs for redirecting visitors between mobile and desktop.

2. Speed is critical

However, when using a responsive design there is a risk of increasing the page load time. Keep loading time speedy by resizing images for different screen resolutions, this is the quickest way to improve the speed of your site. New image format WebP allows you to compress images by a further 25-30% compared to tradition formats such as JPEG and PNG, however, it is not supported by all browsers.

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This week saw the 2014 edition of Magento Imagine take place in Las Vegas, Magento‘s annual event. Through various conferences and workshops spread out over four days, the company acquired by eBay in 2011 presented its new features to the community. This year there was a particular focus on improving and guiding partners use of the e-commerce solution, which is employed by over 240,000 e-commerce shops worldwide.

Lengow attended this year’s edition to get closer to the community, get some interesting insights and most importantly to develop its Magento plugins for the e-commerce solution.

An impressive community

Magento is an open source solution with a strong community and this event really confirmed this! As soon as we arrived we were impressed not only by the sheer number of partners present, but also their passion and enthusiasm for improving the ecommerce solution. There was around fifty partners united in the main hall presenting their innovations.

It was fantastic to be part of such a dynamic and interactive atmosphere. We had the opportunity to speak with a large number of partners, which should lead to some great partnerships in the coming months, which will help evolve Lengow and it’s features!

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Email marketing, despite being one of the older e-marketing tools, remains an essential lever for any e-merchant wishing to create a long lasting relationship with their customers or prospects. The majority of Internet users check their emails at least once a day, thus giving e-merchants a great opportunity to communicate with customers and/or prospects at little cost. E-mailing can be used as a strategic tool to highlight current offers and promotions.
Email can also be used to take advantage of periods which punctuate the life of an e-merchant (sale, celebrations, holidays…), which are great occasions to communicate on your product catalogue.

But how can you create a quality e-mailing campaign? Here are six tips to help you do just that.

1°) Qualify your customer database

Nowadays, the validity of data tends to expire quickly. That is why it is important to regularly update your customer database. Thus you will gain time and get the best results. Make sure to remove incorrect e-mail addresses, duplicate addresses, inactive contacts…

If your email database is not very large, competitions are great way to easily obtain email addresses. During this year’s Lengow Ecommerce Day in Paris, Olivier Martineau from the company SpreadButton gave us some tricks for easily organising this type of marketing operation, on a Facebook page for example. It is also possible to buy or rent email files according to your business sector, but we recommend you to proceed to targeted partnerships for your email campaigns to have a better impact. (Lire la suite…)

Twitter takes a step closer to ecommerce by launching Product Cards. Product cards allow e-commerce sites to display their products on the microblogging social network and make purchases possible from a single tweet.

Here’s what you need to know about this new format to promote your products and how to use it effectively. The Lengow solution already supports the Twitter Product Cards format.

What are Twitter Product Cards?

Twitter Cards allow you to richly represent your content within Tweets. Several types have been created, some contain a video, images, etc. The Product Cards are a new format which allows you to add the following to a tweet: product description, photograph, availability, size, price, user ratings and a link to the merchant’s website. The Product Cards are particularly suited to e-commerce. Below is an example:

Why sell your products on Twitter?

HubSpot, a U.S. A / B testing provider found that tweets containing an image receive on average 36% more clicks, 41% more retweets and 55% more leads that tweets without an image.

Therefore, it is likely that Tweets adopting the Product Card will have higher engagement rates than normal Tweets. The calculation to quantify the advantage of Product Cards for your business is quite simple: consider the engagement generated by your last 30 posts, multiply by 1.55 and your average conversion rate; this will give you the number of sales you can reasonably expect to receive instantly from Twitter Product Cards.

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E-tailers are increasingly turning towards international markets and online payment can be a major barrier to successful internationalisation. It is always possible to choose to sell internationally via marketplaces to avoid this obstacle, but apart from that, here are 3 tips for avoiding the pitfalls of international online payment.

1. Use an international payment operator

Developing your ecommerce business internationally can lead to several administrative complexities. When you want to receive payments outside of your country via your online store, you must comply with local regulations regarding online payment, secure online transactions and adjust payment methods in relation to the preferences of local customers.

A payment service provider (PSP) can be used to overcome these regulatory and technical constraints. A PSP offers shops online services for accepting electronic payments by a variety of payment methods. It manages the different currencies and contracts for distance selling internationally.

2. Adapt the payment method to your target

The preferred payment method can vary significantly from country to country. For example, in France, Credit Card and Paypal are the most popular payment methods, whereas German shoppers often prefer settling their online purchases by bank transfer or payment invoice. However, when selling in the Netherlands, it is critical to provide the iDEAL payment method.

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[This is the third in a series of articles regarding new Lengow modules for the most popular e-commerce platforms. Today we present the Lengow Plugin for WooCommerce from WordPress.]

Following numerous requests and suggestions from our merchants, the Lengow team conducted a major overhaul of the Lengow export modules Prestashop and Magento. A Brand new module is also available for WooCommerce in order to facilitate product exportation for e-merchants using WordPress.

New WooCommerce Module

Access export settings

As Lengow is an additional feature of WooCommerce, every e-merchant using WordPress can access the import and export options for the Lengow module in « WooCommerce »> « Lengow Settings ».

It is now very easy to configure the export settings using this new plugin designed for the WordPress interface. After entering your account details (client ID, group ID and API key) and the authorised IP addresses to access your product feeds, you can choose the items to export using the « Export » tab.

Export Settings

Configuring your Lengow export settings in WooCommerce for WordPress has been simplified to provide maximum clarity and efficiency. You can now:

• Export all products
• Export inactive products,
• Automatically export new products,
• Export declined products,
• Export product specifications,
• Select the type and number images
• Export to a file

With this new plugin, you can instantly see the result of your export by clicking the « Export » link at the bottom of the tab.

Export formats in WooCommerce

In your WooCommerce back office, you can select the following export formats: CSV, XML, JSON or YAML. We advise you to use the CSV format.

Selecting exportable items

With this new Lengow module, you can now choose the items that you want to export in your flow, rather than exporting all items and removing them afterwards.

You select the type and number of products to be exported in the final flow for every type of flow and every distributer.

Select the characteristics of products to be exported:

The team Lengow have made it possible for merchants to access the main features used in the selection of products to be exported.

In case of doubt, a tooltip (indicated in the green box above) gives you more information about the option.

Note: To do a partial selection, be sure to uncheck the option « Export all products » in your default options. (in the red box above)

Importing intergrated orders

For the Lengow plugin to be complete, we integrated the import settings of your orders. These are now configurable from your WooCommerce module (tab « Lengow Settings », then « Import »). This allows you to select the name of the different order statuses according to the customary practice in your WooCommerce administration interface.

Via the Import tab of the module, you can also:

• Select the payment method that will be used for the order.
• Select the default carrier,
• Indicate the number of days of orders in the export list
• Change prices: If you apply different prices on the marketplaces and on your website,
• Change the products: To change orders containing out-of-stock or desactivated products
• Reactivate the import in case of a blocked import.

Note that a manual import command is also possible directly via the Lengow API.

Automatic orders

It is also possible to use WordPress’ CRON tasks to do automatic import commands at scheduled times. You can then set the frequency of the automatic import of orders from your WooCommerce back office to Lengow interface.

Migrating Feeds

It is sometimes necessary to migrate your feeds. In this case, it is imperative to ensure that the destination stream contains the same information as the original source stream. For this, the Lengow module allows you to migrate one or all feeds at once to their new destination.

Lengow statistics in WooCommerce

The new module also allows you to view your main profitability indicators directly within your WordPress dashboard and to select the variable to be displayed (clicks, sales, ROI, sales, etc.).

You can now try the new Lengow the modules for WooCommerce, Magento or Prestashop, which now offer many attractive features for online merchants.

Download Lengow’s WooCommerce module

The new Lengow module for WooCommerce (WordPress) is already available. You can download it from the Lengow site. If you have any questions regarding them, please do not hesitate to contact our technical and support teams.

Following the announcement of its imminent release on the 3^rd April, at the Lengow Ecommerce Day Paris, we are delighted to announce that the Lengow Hub, an online space dedicated to e-retailers, is as of the 16^th April, 2014 available.

What is the Lengow Hub?

It is a glossary of e-commerce tools, drivers and actors for all merchants who want to stay up to date, seek new distribution channels and improve their performance!

Since its creation in 2009, Lengow has partnered with many broadcasters. With over 1200 active partnerships, Lengow is in an ideal position to offer the e-commerce community a website containing all the necessary information for online merchants to develop their activity.

On the Lengow Hub you will discover:

• The best e-commerce tools
• New marketing levers
• Additional acquisition channels.

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Among the partners of the second edition of Lengow E-commerce Day, we were delighted to welcome Google, who presented a workshop dedicated to Google Remarketing. Led by Catherine Boisset and Leo Sei, it was one of the most popular workshops of the Lengow Ecommerce Day 2014.

Leo Sei, Remarketing and Tag Solutions Engineer, began by reminding us some important stats: one visit to a website is not enough to convert a visitor into a buyer, given that « 96% leave the website without making a conversion, 70% abandon their cart without completing the purchase and 49% visit two to four sites before making a purchase« .

Whether you want to reach customers or prospects who’ve shown some interest (site visit, …), to increase the number of customers and create a more significant relationship with them, or to re-engage with customers with   »with the right message at the right time », remarketing is now a key way to improve the effectiveness of campaigns.

The aim of Google Remarketing is clear: convert site visitors into customers, while improving your return on investment (ROI).

Catherine Boisset, SEEMEA Remarketing Expert, continued the presentation by identifying the three pillars for higher performance according to Google:

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